Miscellaneous Online Quizbowl Tournament Tips

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entropy
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Miscellaneous Online Quizbowl Tournament Tips

Post by entropy »

This post is basically a compendium of observations I've made from playing and staffing some recent tournaments. I'll update it if I think of more things I want to add, and if you have your own tips you're more than welcome to reply to this post.
  • Make teams and players put their answers in text chat so there's a record of what they said. A player's answers are potentially valuable evidence for cheating.
  • When using my bot for Discord tournaments, don't use the .t command. Add a team to your room with .a when the previous game in your room has finished, and remove a team from your room with .r when the game they played has finished [only if they have to go somewhere else, of course]. This is a much simpler and less headache-prone system that I fully endorse, and I will mark the .t command as deprecated after this weekend's tournaments are finished.
  • If you're running a Discord tournament with divisons, create a central tournament server [for meetings, announcements, and such] and then a separate server for each division in which teams will play their games. This simplifies setup, since you no longer have one mega-server with a million rooms, roles, and members. It also helps with the finals process, since holding the Competitive division finals in the Competitive division server means that the teams who are playing the Novice division finals can't see the Competitive division finals questions. At Cal Cup #1, the .f command for my bot could not be used because of that concern, but separate division servers resolves that potential issue and makes finals permissions much more streamlined.
  • Get as many staffers as you can. The more staffers, the better. It's important to have extra roving scorekeepers who can check in on suspicious individuals or just help hurry up slow rooms, both of which are far more common online than in person. Online tournament staff [and players] also have a bad habit of sleeping in more than their in person counterparts for whatever reason, so you need to be prepared to absorb the personnel losses caused by underachieving alarm clocks or absolutely exhausted staffers.
Hopefully this post is helpful, and I'd love it if other online tournament TDs/veteran players came forward to share small suggestions like these!

[Mods, I'm very sorry if I've put this post in the wrong subforum; please feel free to move it if that's the case.]
karan
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Re: Miscellaneous Online Quizbowl Tournament Tips

Post by Stained Diviner »

I'm running a tournament in the near future and thinking of just eliminating the text rooms. Having people type answers leads to longer matches and the necessity of evaluating answers with typos, and it also requires moderators to have another window in addition to the questions, the scoresheet, and video. Have people run tournaments without text channels, and has it worked? Are the text channels truly necessary?

In Illinois, we have had some tournaments with no video, and it seems like anything with video is a better anti-cheating measure than anything without video. That's not a criticism of those tournaments, which were largely successful low stakes tournaments that gave a lot of high school students a chance to play quizbowl.
David Reinstein
Head Writer and Editor for Scobol Solo, Masonics, and IESA; TD for Scobol Solo and Reinstein Varsity; IHSSBCA Board Member; IHSSBCA Chair (2004-2014); PACE President (2016-2018)
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Mike Bentley
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Re: Miscellaneous Online Quizbowl Tournament Tips

Post by Mike Bentley »

The advantage of text is that it gives people a backup when their microphone isn't working. It also makes it easier in some circumstances to collaborate on bonuses since you can type while the moderator is still reading. But you can probably do a tournament without text channels so long as it's planned out in advance.
Mike Bentley
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Adviser, Quizbowl Team at University of Washington
University of Maryland, Class of 2008
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